Effective Cross-Agency Collaboration Enabled by Data

The Hawaiʻi School Facilities Authority (SFA) was created over multiple legislative sessions in response to the need to provide and improve public school facilities so students, educators, and communities have access to the environments they need to succeed. Although SFA is administratively attached to the Department of Education, it is a collaborative body that works at the intersection of the Governor’s office, Legislature, and Board of Education. “SFA has the potential to be flexible and agile in meeting Hawai‘i’s education facility needs. We’re focused on doing what is needed and what works through being complementary, not duplicative or competitive, to the agencies that already exist,” says Keone Farias, SFA’s Executive Director.

Farias, who has 30 years of experience as an educator and administrator in Hawai‘i’s school system prior to becoming SFA’s executive director, is well-suited to navigate the complex ecosystem of resource management, education, and planning that falls under SFA’s kuleana. “SFA can cover a lot of things – from using underutilized land for revenue generation, to co-locating wraparound community services on campuses to serve keiki to kūpuna, to modernizing existing facilities to create 21st century schools,” Farias says of SFA’s broad and holistic scope. In particular, Hawai‘i Data Collaborative met with Farias to discuss SFA’s role and the role of data in the Ready Keiki Initiative.

Ready Keiki: Data as a Starting Point

Photo credit: Hawai‘i Department of Education

SFA has been tasked to create 465 pre-K classrooms by 2032 in coordination with supporting teacher housing efforts to ensure there are trained and available teachers to teach in the newly added classrooms. In order to build classrooms and housing where they are most needed and will be best utilized, SFA – alongside other community and government partners, including the Executive Office on Early Learning – has turned to data to make the most informed choices possible.

“The decision around the number of classrooms, and where to build them, is based on census data. We looked at how many [classroom] seats would be needed based on population trends,” says Farias. “We have rough numbers for housing and which areas have a growing keiki population, but there are still unknowns. We don’t know where parents work and where, or when they can pick up and drop off their kids. For example, if you live in Nānākuli and work in Waikīkī, where do you want your kids to go to school? What does the traffic look like? We’re making educated guesses [based on the data available], but we won’t actually know until we build.”

The Ready Keiki Locator Tool allows users to view Ready Keiki sites, all pre-K sites, estimates of where three- and four-year olds might be geographically, as well as estimates of where folks are going to work.

In addition to census data, SFA also works with other education sector partners to collect data on available and underutilized classrooms as well as community-based anecdotal data on where there is need. “You can have hunches based on seeing areas developed, but having a good map for population and school capacity in an area gives us the ability to drill down to see school trends. In order to assess the need for pre-K classrooms, we look at the capacity of an area, the number of current students, the number of kindergarten classrooms, and whether population is growing or declining. Having clear data helps us to not oversimplify complex situations.”

Learning and Iterating Based on Initial Data

So far, SFA has built 11 classrooms in less than a year, and is on track to have 44 more classrooms open and operational by August 2024. Speaking to data collaborations and the importance of HDC’s capacity support, as well as other partners, to mobilize quickly and effectively, Farias says, “We over-communicate and stay highly engaged with our partners and the data,” adding, “We need to be able to shift mid-project [if the data supports it] to find the highest and best use of resources. Having data to support our decisions makes it easier for everyone to get on board.”

SFA is already learning from the classrooms that have opened to date and gathering valuable information from them. Specifically, Farias mentioned classrooms at Honowai Elementary School in Waipahu, Nānākuli Elementary School in Waiʻanae, and Wailuku Elementary School on Maui. “At Honowai, we built for 20 students but got 40 applications. In Nānākuli, we built for 20 students and got over 30 applications. In both these cases, we identified there was need in a community, but underestimated it and had to turn away applicants. In Wailuku, we opened a classroom but it was shut down due to a lack of staffing. Based on the student population there’s actually a need for three more classrooms in Wailuku, but if we don’t have teachers then the classrooms aren’t that helpful. We’ve known that there is an early childhood educator pipeline issue for decades, but we need to do something about it now. Even if the data is negative, it’s better to have it and know,” says Farias. While the publicly shared information surrounding classroom construction is often black or white, Farias and his team often work directly with community to draw insight from the context of potential locations, which is equally important data in planning where to build future classrooms.

Photo credit: Hawai‘i School Facilities Authority

Out of the eleven open classrooms, not every classroom is at the twenty-student capacity but all are pretty close, suggesting that SFA’s data-guided approach has been effective. Farias says, “Once there are 44 classrooms, we will have more data to better understand trends. We’ll know where the outliers are, what works, what mistakes were made. We need to keep going to be able to apply the data, learn, and iterate the process.”

A Model for Cross-Sector and Cross-Agency Collaboration

“Part of getting to the 465 classrooms and the housing to support educators is finding creative solutions and leveraging existing resources, which requires building relationships so people will not only share information, but be willing to work with us,” says Farias. “It wasn’t easy [to build 11 classrooms in less than a year], and it required complete cooperation between SFA, the Department of Education, and the Board of Education. But in the end, it’s a win for everyone.”

Farias is open about SFA’s process and is willing to share with the hope that other agencies can find something valuable – whether it’s operational procedure, data strategy for decision making and/or accountability, or a willingness to “color outside the lines” and collaborate to get things done.

A good example of that openness to share is SFA’s weekly data reporting for the Ready Keiki initiative, which offers a summary of classroom construction phases by island, and directly feeds into the Ready Keiki Tracker. SFA has agreed to make construction phase data publicly available to not only keep the public informed, but to also support the parallel, collaborative efforts of other stakeholders of the Ready Keiki initiative. This timely and accurate data is used by working groups focused on enrollment outreach, as well as working groups focused on where to build future schools based on what is currently in the construction pipeline. As the Ready Keiki initiative develops, it will be critical for stakeholders, like SFA, to continue collaborating closely around data as they work towards completing the biggest expansion of preschool access in Hawai‘i by 2032.